Skip to main content

Smoke

PROLOGUE

There’s never smoke without fire.

This was first said by someone suggesting a rumor might be well-founded.

Words in the media today often function like a smoke screen for hiding flames.

The government of North Korea has just announced that they have tested an H-bomb fired from a submarine. Endless discussion about whether this is true or a bluff.

No reflections around the fact that in the oceans of the world there are about sixty fully armed nuclear submarines awaiting instructions day and night. 

 

Once upon a time men, women, and (secretly) children smoked.

 

“Can I give you a light?”

“Thanks,” says the other, holding out a packet. “Take one yourself.”

 

Whilst smoking together, we exchanged our views on the world.

 

We described journeys.


We discussed the class struggle.

 

We swapped dreams.

 

There was a companionship.

 


We smoked in trains
and even in planes.

 

We smoked between games of tennis.

 

We smoked in restaurants.

 

Ashtrays were gadgets of hospitality.

 

Then something happened, and everything changed.

 

The storyteller, essayist, screenwriter, dramatist, and critic John Berger (1926–2017) was one of the most internationally influential writers of the past fifty years. His many books include Ways of Seeing (1972), the Booker Prize–winning novel G. (1972), Here Is Where We Meet (2005), From A to X (2008), Cataract (with Selçuk Demirel) (2012), and, most recently, Confabulations (2016). He died in January 2017.

Selçuk Demirel was born in Artvin, Turkey, in 1954. He trained as an architect and moved to Paris in 1978, where he still lives. His illustrations and books have appeared in many prominent European and American publications. Demirel’s work ranges from book illustrations to magazine covers, from children’s books to postcards and posters.

From Smoke, by John Berger and Selçuk Demirel. Published by Notting Hill Editions. Text copyright © 2016 John Berger and Selçuk Demirel. Drawings copyright © 2016 Selçuk Demirel.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2jrpQgG

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more